Missionary Masculinity versus Missionary Femininity
Kristin Fjelde Tjelle, School of Mission and Theology (MHS)
My PhD-project is a historical investigation of missionaries and masculinities. The group of
men that are scrutinized represented the Lutheran Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) in
Zululand and Natal in the period 1870-1930. I seek in my thesis to answer three questions.
Firstly, how was a missionary masculinity constructed in NMS? Secondly, how was the
missionary masculinity re-presented in the Norwegian mission discourse? And thirdly, what
practical implications had the constitution of a missionary masculinity for the missionaries
themselves, but also for other groups of men and women participating in the Norwegian-Zulu
encounter? In an effort to answer these questions, I have studied a selection of different
genres of textual sources, all remnants from the actual historical period.
It is the masculinity of the Norwegian male missionaries that are examined in my work. The
use of the concept masculinity indicates that my work should be regarded as part of gender
studies in general and of studies on men and masculinities in particular. The term masculinity
is in gender research widely used as an analytical term to get a better understanding of men’s
gendered lives and gendered social systems. It is further used to analyze institutional practises
and cultural patterns. Even if it in everyday speech might be common to use the term
masculinity descriptively (as an identity mark for men, as men’s psychological dispositions
etc.), this is not how it is used in contemporary gender research. In the last decades, gender
studies have been enriched with the development of an additional focus on studies on men and
masculinities. A social constructivist perspective has since the 1980s strongly influenced the
research field. From this perspective men and masculinities are understood as socially
constructed, produced and reproduced.1 Essentialist definitions of masculinity are repelled,
there are no such things as “natural given” masculine identities and masculine attributes. Men
and masculinities are seen as variable and changing across time (history) and space (culture),
within societies and through life courses and biographies.
In my project I focus on the male missionaries in NMS, but the Norwegian mission in 19th
century south eastern Africa was not a clean-cut masculine project, quite the opposite. From
the pioneer days both men and women participated in the mission enterprise. In the period
1844-1930 56 men and 82 women were labourers in NMS’ Zulu-mission. To be historically
correct, the missionary title was, at least in the nineteenth-century, an exclusively male title.
But not even all men who served in the mission qualified for the title. It was first and foremost
educated theologians and ordained pastors who were regarded as missionaries. The work of
these men belonged to what was understood as the direct or real mission work - to evangelise
and to build Christian congregations. Skilled male artisans and craftsmen, who were
employed by the mission and sent to the field to construct the first mission stations, were
defined as assistant missionaries. Their work was related to the “exterior” or “outward” sector
of the mission project, and thereby regarded as indirect mission work. A woman married to a
missionary was labelled a missionary wife. Unmarried women employed by NMS were called
female missionary workers. Also women’s labour were defined as indirect mission work, both
the work related to the well beings of the missionary and his family (nursing, midwife
services, housekeeping, educating of the missionaries’ children), as well as services towards
1
Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Robert William Connell, Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities
(Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2005), 3.
1
the indigenous people of a more “civilising” kind (health, education, industrial and
agricultural services).
The modern missionary movement of the nineteenth century engaged Protestant as well as
Catholic women on a large scale in the United States, Britain and British ex-colonies such as
Canada and Australia, continental Europe and the Nordic countries. Women played central
roles at home as supportive fund-raisers and also as missionary agents in parts of the world
which were defined as non-Christian. The first women in the “mission field” were the
missionary wives. Their primarily task was to serve their husbands and families in respect to
sexualities, childbearing, child-rearing, cooking, cleaning, sewing, gardening, keeping poultry
and cattle. The missionary wives were not directly employed or commissioned by the
missions, and they were not paid separate wages. Yet, they were considered as important
resources in the mission, both as their husband’s soul mates and co-workers, but also in their
own right. A second group of women in the field were the female missionary workers
supposed to serve in the missionary households. The presence of female assistance within the
missionary households was accepted and formalised in NMS from 1870.2 While the
missionary wives and the female missionary workers by some scholars have been regarded as
“peri-professional” missionaries, a third group - “the professional female mission worker” –
arrived on the scene from the 1880s,3 and from 1887 NMS also formalised the use of women
in the direct mission work as “Bible women”, teachers and deaconesses.4
By 1900, white women outnumbered men in most western missions, as wives, teachers,
nurses and nuns. But according to the British historians Patrician Grishaw and Peter Sherlock,
it was only from the 1980s that scholars focused gendered lens on the history of modern
mission.5 Historians who have studied the relation between mission and women in a
2
Martha Nikoline Hirsch was in 1870 sent by NMS to South Africa as a first female missionary worker. She was
commissioned to serve as a governess in the missionary families.
3
Rhonda Anne Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian
Mission (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003).
4
A NMS’ general assembly decision of 1887.
5
Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock, "Women and Cultural Exchanges," in Missions and Empire, ed.
Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). In a review of the last decades’ research on
women and mission Grishaw and Sherlock see three central developments. Firstly, American feminist historians
with an interest in women and religion were the first to argue that the missionary enterprise had played a critical
role in transforming the whole of society, and further that women were central historical agents in the mission
movement. Central works have been Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in
Turn-of-the-century China (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1984); Patricia R. Hill, The World
Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1985); Dana L. Robert, American Women in Mission: A Social
History of their Thought and Practice (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997). Secondly, anthropologists
and social historians, also in the 1980s, found missions to be interesting sites for observation and
ethnographically historical studies of cultural conflicts and gender relations. Influential works in this category
have been Diane Langmore, Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874-1914 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press,
1989); Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 1989); Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood, and Shirley Ardner, eds., Women and
Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions (Oxford: Berg, 1993).
Thirdly, since the late 1980s feminist scholars have been responded to post-colonial critiques questioning the
role of white women as agents of mission enterprises, and mission archives have been used to explore the
relation between gender, race and Empire. The influence of post-colonial studies is found in a number of recent
works on women and mission: The influence of post-colonial studies is found in a number of recent works on
women and mission: Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian women, and Imperial
Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Jayawardena
Kumari, The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Colonial Rule (New
York/London: Routledge, 1995); Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy Lutkehaus, Gendered Missions: Women and
2
Norwegian context have been influenced by international research trends. Some have focused
on the rise of a female missionary movement in Norway and its importance for the
development of women’s democratic rights,6 others on female missionary agents,7 and others
on cultural exchanges and the mission’s gendered organisation.8 The post-colonial challenge
is reflected upon in a recent collection of essays on women and mission in a Nordic context.9
With this up-to-date and immense portfolio of research on women and mission, and further on
missionary organisation’s gendered ideologies and practices, it would in my opinion be a
huge mistake to not let my study of missionaries and masculinities reflect upon and respond to
it. In a recent article the Norwegian sociologist and gender researcher Øystein Gullvåg Holter
criticises the tendency in current research on men and masculinities “to marginalize women
and femininities, and recreate men, manliness and masculinity as the big central issue”.10 It
seems like a paradox that this tendency is found within a research field which is trying to
abolish patriarchal logics of this kind. Holter explains the androcentrism (focus on men or
men’s interests) in studies on men and masculinities partly as a historical reaction against a
tendency of gynocentrism (focus on women and women’s interests) in feminist and women’s
studies. In general, he finds a homosocial focus to be a tendency in any gender studies and
asks for “a better integration of the gender equality dimension in the research framework of
men and masculinities, including a more heterosocial focus and a greater awareness of
implicit androcentrism”.
In my research on missionary masculinity I hope to avoid this one-sided homosocial
perspective, so brilliant observed by Holter. I aim to examine the relation between men and
women within the organisational system of NMS in South Africa, likewise, how missionary
masculinities were constructed in coherence and conflict with missionary femininities.
Holter’s suggestive theoretical perspectives have further inspired me to try to avoid what he
calls the “powercentric framework” so much used in masculinity studies.11 As an alternative,
he describes a more materialistic approach where gender is “produced more than powered”.
His point is that gender in/equality not necessarily is determined by gender alone, but that a
Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Susan Thorne,
Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-century England (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1999); Myra Rutherdale, Women and the White Man's God: Gender and
Race in the Canadian Mission Field (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002).
6
Kristin Fjelde Tjelle, "Kvinder hjælper Kvinder": Misjonskvinneforeningsbevegelsen i Norge 1860-1910
(Unpublished Ma thesis, University of Oslo, 1990); Kristin Norseth, "...at sætte sig imod vilde være som at
stoppe Elven" (Unpublished Ma thesis, Menighetsfakultetet, 1997); Kristin Norseth, "La os bryte over tvert med
vor stumhet!": Kvinners vei til myndighet i de kristelige organisasjonene 1842-1912 (Dissertation for the degree
of Dr. Theol., MF Norwegian School of Theology, 2007); Bjørg Seland, "'Called by the Lord' - Women's Place
in the Norwegian Missionary Movement," in Gender and Vocation. Women, Religion and Social Change in the
Nordic Countries, 1830-1940, ed. Pirjo Markkola (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2000).
7
Lisbeth Mikaelsson, Kallets ekko: Studier i misjon og selvbiografi, vol. nr 17 (Kristiansand: Høyskoleforlaget,
2003); Inger Marie Okkenhaug, "Herren har givet mig et rigt virkefelt: Kall, religion og arbeid blant armenere i
det osmanske riket," Historisk tidsskrift 88, no. 1 (2009).
8
Karina Hestad Skeie, "Building God's Kingdom: The Importance of the House to Nineteenth Century
Norwegian Missionaries in Madagascar " in Ancestors, Power and History in Madagascar, ed. Karen Middlton
(Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999); Line Nyhagen Predelli, Issues of Gender, Race, and Class in the
Norwegian Missionary Society in Nineteenth-Century Norway and Madagascar (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen
Press, 2003).
9
Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Gender, Race and Religion: Nordic Missions 1860-1940 (Uppsala: Swedish Institute
of Missionary Research, 2003).
10
Øystein Gullvåg Holter, "Power and structure in studies of men and masculinities," Norma. Nordisk tidsskrift
for maskulinitetsstudier 4, no. 2 (2009).
11
Ibid.
3
broader scope is needed. “The doing of gender” is structured also by non-gendered structures
(ethnicity, age, class) and societal developments (development of welfare systems, extension
of democratic rights, a general small/great extent of social in/equality, small/huge gap in
income), and intersectionality as analytical lens is of greatest importance. In another essay by
Holter, he asserts that one in gender research should distinguish between patriarchal
structure, which he defines as the general character of the oppression of women and the
linked oppression of non-privileged men within a given society and culture, and gender
system, a partially independent and dynamic framework of meaning.12 A gender system is not
simply an echo of the structures of inequality or patriarchy. It develops its own dynamics,
sometimes acting on its own, often with tension and conflict-filled relations to patriarchal
structures. The core idea of Holter is that we have to distinguish between patriarchal structure
and gender system developments and then to look at the changing connections between them.
NMS in South Africa was definitely a patriarchal system and in the period I have examined,
1870-1930, gender equality was out of question. Missionary women, as well as Zulu men and
Zulu women in the Norwegian mission church, were subordinated the structural leadership
and cultural hegemony of white male missionaries. Karin Sarja in her study of the missionary
women in the Church of Sweden Mission in Zululand and Natal in the period 1876-1902,
which resembles the case of NMS, found that women had to subordinate three levels of
patriarchal structures; firstly, the central mission management at home, secondly, the
missionary conference in the field and thirdly, the male missionary managing the mission
station.13 Still, within these structures of patriarchy considerable changes found place in terms
of gender in/equality. Line Nyhagen Predelli, in her study of NMS in Madagascar and
Norway 1880-1910, speaks of “contested patriarchy” and “contested gender regimes”.14
Mission historians suppose a “feminisation of the mission forces” by late 19th century, both in
terms of a surplus of women among the missionary recruits as well as a feminised mission
philosophy – what Dana L. Robert calls “The Mission of Motherhood”.15 The cultural and
theological attitude of the international women’s missionary movement at the beginning of
the twentieth century was characterized by its motto “Woman’s work for woman”.16 With
nineteenth-century assumptions that men and women occupied different roles in society, this
gendered mission philosophy emphasized that it took women to reach other women and their
children with the gospel. Behind the theory lay law middle-class, western assumptions, that
western women needed to help liberate their sisters around the world by reaching them in
their homes, teaching them to read, and providing medical care for their bodies. Conversion to
Christianity provided not only eternal salvation for women, but it also raised their self-worth
and improved their position in oppressive, patriarchal societies. In Norway, the woman’s
missionary movement formulated its program in a similar way - “Women help women”
12
Øystein Gullvåg Holter, "Social Theories for Researching Men and Masculinities," in Handbook of studies on
men & masculinities, ed. Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and R. W. Connell (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage
Publications, 2005). See also Øystein Gullvåg Holter, Män i rörelse: jämställdhet, förändring och social
innovation i Norden (Stockholm: Gidlund, 2007).
13
Karin Sarja, "The Missionary Career of Baroness Hedvig Posse 1887-1913," in Gender, Race and Religion:
Nordic missions 1860-1940, ed. Inger Marie Okkenhaug (Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Missionary Research,
2003).
14
Predelli, Issues of Gender, Race, and Class in the Norwegian Missionary Society in Nineteenth-Century
Norway and Madagascar.
15
Dana L. Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity became a World Religion (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009), 124.
16
Dana L. Robert (ed.), Gospel Bearers, Gospel Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century
(Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2002), 7.
4
(Kvinder hjælper Kvinder).17 Resourceful and creative female mission leaders established
female mission networks, organisations and institutions and they recruited female
missionaries. They edited women’s mission magazines and wrote women’s mission books,
and imported and implemented the central conceptions and ideologies of the international
women’s missionary movement into a Norwegian context.18
How did the international woman’s missionary movement influence on NMS’ organisation in
South Africa? What was the male reaction to this worldwide feminisation of the mission
forces? In my research, I found that it took quite some time before the international program
of woman’s work for woman was accepted by the male dominated management of NMS in
South Africa. While professional female missionary workers in Madagascar could vote and
speak at the missionary conferences from 1905,19 missionary women were first twenty years
later, in 1924, given the same democratic rights in NMS in South Africa.20 It should be the
professional work of missionary nurses which paved the way for men’s acceptance of
women’s missionary work in NMS in South Africa. After the sudden interruption of Christian
Oftebros’ career as a medical missionary in 1888, no physicians had been commissioned by
NMS to South Africa. The missionaries had occasionally brought up he issue,21 as both the
mission fields in Madagascar and China were well equipped with physicians, nurses,
deaconesses and male deacons, and the construction of health institutions had been an area of
priority.22 The issue of a medical mission in Zululand was an ongoing theme of negotiation
between the missionary conference and NMS’ Home Board in the 1920s.23 While it was
discussed whether NMS should recruit a female or male physician, where a possible hospital
should be situated, and how extensive it’s services should be, two missionary nurses
unnoticed established tiny hospitals at Ekombe and Mahlabatini mission stations.24
Elida Ulltveit-Moe was supposed to go to Madagascar as a missionary nurse but due to
medical reasons transferred to South Africa in 1922. Since there were no hospitals in NMS’
mission in South Africa, the missionary conference appointed her to assist in the
congregational work at Ekombe mission station.25 She arrived at Ekombe in December 1922
where she soon offered her medical services. The first equipment she purchased was a horse
17
Tjelle, "Kvinder hjælper Kvinder": Misjonskvinneforeningsbevegelsen i Norge 1860-1910.
Lisbeth Mikaelsson, "'Kvinne, ta ansvar og ledelse i dine egne hender': Historien om Henny Dons," Norsk
tidsskrift for misjon 56, no. 2 (2002); Kristin Norseth, "To alen av hvilket stykke? Tvillingsøstrene LMF og
KMA i norsk, nordisk og internasjonalt perspektiv," in Ibid.; Kristin Fjelde Tjelle, "Lærerinnenes
Misjonsforbund gjennom 100 år," in Ibid.; Okkenhaug, "Herren har givet mig et rigt virkefelt: Kall, religion og
arbeid blant armenere i det osmanske riket."
19
Predelli, Issues of Gender, Race, and Class in the Norwegian Missionary Society in Nineteenth-Century
Norway and Madagascar , 185-188.
20
Minutes from NMS’ Missionary Conference (MC) in South Africa 1924, Mission Archive (MS) – School of
Mission and Theology (MHS).
21
See for instance minutes from MC 1911, MA-MHS, 19-25.
22
Ludvig Munthe, Venstrehandsmisjon?: Misjons legar på Madagaskar frå 1860-åra og ut hundreåret (Oslo:
Luther forlag, 1985); Thor Strandenæs, "Misjonsdiakonien som kulturuttrykk i Kina: En tekst- og
billeddokumentasjon fra Hunanprovinsen," in Misjon og kultur. Festskrift til Jan-Martin Berentsen, ed. Thor
Strandenæs (Stavanger: Misjonshøgskolens forlag, 2006).
23
See minutes from MC 1921, MA-MHS, 26; MC 1922, 21; MC 1923, 18; MC 1925, 28-29; MC 1926, 55-64;
MC 1927, 34-44; MC 1928, 88-96; MC 1929, 111-113; MC 1930, 46-49. See also NMS’ Home Board’s letter of
answer to the missionary conference in South Africa 1926, 16-20 & 1928, 20-21, MA-MHS.
24
Today both hospitals, Nkonjeni and Ekombe hospitals, are managed by the KwaZulu-Natal Department of
Health. See http://www.kznhealth.gov.za
25
Minutes from MC 1922, MA-MHS, 6 and NMS’ Home Board’s letter of answer to the missionary conference
in South Africa 1922, 2.
18
5
to take her to patient-visits in the neighbouring homesteads.26 Eventually patients started to
come to the mission station to receive medical care. In 1924 she opened a policlinic. A store
room functioned as dispensary and two traditional Zulu huts were raised for the in-patients,
who slept on straw mats.27 Ulltveit-Moe was in her labour very much supported by the
missionary couple she lived together with, Peter Andreas R. Strømme and his wife Kirsten.
Mrs. Strømme was a nurse herself, while Mr. Strømme in addition to his theological
education had been trained as a deacon, actually a male nurse, at The Norwegian Deacon’s
Home in the years 1893-1897.28 The activities quickly expanded, and in 1926 the mission
hospital was visited by 3 200 patients.29 At this time Ulltveit-Moe was mentally and
physically exhausted, and her female colleagues Margaretha Titlestad and Bertha Gilje, both
wrote letters to a newly established “Female Nurses’ Missionary Association”
(Sykepleierskenes Missionring - SMR) in Norway, begging them to recruit and financially
support a missionary nurse in Zululand. SMR answered the Zulu-missionaries’ prayers and
Borghild Magnussen became the organisation’s first representative in the mission field, an
event which in SMR’s history has been described as “a milestone”.30 The interest for UlltveitMoe’s medical mission among supporters in Norway was growing, and she raised
considerable funds for the purpose of a proper hospital at Ekombe. With the Home Board’s
blessing, though not their grants, a tiny hospital building with five rooms was erected in
1929.31
Martha Palm started a similar hospital at Mahlabathini mission station in October 1925.32 She
originally came to South Africa to work as a housekeeper at NMS’ Home for missionaries’
children in Durban in 1920, but applied in 1923 for an opportunity to serve as a missionary
nurse. Her application was accepted, although no financial support for her new medical
mission project was granted. As was the case with Ekombe mission hospital, funds were
raised among supporters in Norway but also in the Scandinavian settler milieu in Durban.
Also Palm was supported and encouraged by the missionary couple serving at Mahlabathini,
Marie and Johan Kjelvei. She received her first patients in an old stable at the mission station,
and a children’s room in Kjelvei’s house functioned as dispensary. Quite soon she was able to
build a first simple hospital building containing of three rooms; one was admission-room,
kitchen and dispensary, a second was for in-patients, and a third room was for Palm herself.
After a year a new building for in-patients was raised, and also two traditional Zulu huts for
accompanying family members. To a great extent the hospital functioned as a maternity ward.
26
Elida Fykse, Til Sydkorsets land. Studiebrev til norske gjenter og gutar fra misjonær Elida Fykse (Stavanger:
Det norske misjonsselskaps Bibel- og misjonskurs pr. korrespondanse, 1946), vol. 3, 5-10.
27
Martha Palm, "Vår hospitalsvirksomhet," in Zulu. Evangeliets landvinning, ed. Johan Kjelvei (Stavanger: Det
Norske Misjonsselskaps trykkeri, 1932).
28
Strømme was accepted as a student at NMS’ Mission School from 1997 and was ordained in 1903. According
to the historian Gunnar Stave, several of the young men who were refused by NMS as missionary candidates in
1893 were recommended to apply for admission at the newly established institution (1890) for male deacons in
Christiania. Strømme was probably one of them. Both the Mission School and the Deacon’s Home recruited
their students among the same group of men; men from lower social classes who lacked higher education, but
still had strong commitments to serve in church or mission. Gunnar Stave, Mannsmot og tenarsinn. Det norske
Diakonhjem i hundre år (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 1990), 105-106.
29
Minutes from MC 1927, MA-MHS, 15-17.
30
See Ingrid Wyller, Sykepleiernes Misjonsring S.M.R. 50 år (Oslo: Sykepleiernes Misjonsring 1971), 31-34.
While Borghild Magnussen finished missionary courses in Oslo and midwife training in Edinburgh, LMF paid
the salary for Bertha Nerø who from 1926 assisted Elida Ulltveit-Moe at Ekombe mission hospital. Magnussen
served at Ekombe in the period 1929-1935 but established later NMS’ third mission hospital at Umphumulo in
1935.
31
NMT 84, no. 34 (1929): 267.
32
NMT 83, no. 19 (1928): 150; Palm, "Vår hospitalsvirksomhet"; Vesla Hafstad, The History of Nkonjeni
Hospital Mahlabatini District, Kwa Zulu, South Africa: From 1925-1978 (Norway: Vesla Hafstad, 2000).
6
In 1927 Palm reported that she had received 2 049 patients in her policlinic and assisted 78
mothers with their deliveries.
It is interesting to notice that the medical mission in Zululand entirely was run by female
missionary nurses. It was only from the 1950s that NMS equipped their mission hospitals in
South Africa with physicians, who then happened to be men.33 As mentioned, female
missionary workers were finally accepted as members of the missionary conference in 1924,
and simultaneously, a process which resulted in male missionaries’ expanded understanding
of the nature of mission work evolved. Both the sectors of education and health, the
traditional spheres of the female missionaries, were to a greater extent accepted as “real
mission work” and defined as “direct mission work”. These processes were of course of
importance for the women involved, but they also influenced on men’s missionary identities.
Strømme as an example, educated both as a deacon and a pastor, had for years missed a focus
of diaconia in mission, and he became an outstanding defender of Ulltveit-Moe’s and Palm’s
medical missions. During a missionary conference discussion in 1924, he stated that he never
had regretted that he became a missionary, but he regretted that he never became a medical
missionary.34 He regarded it as a huge drawback for NMS’ Zulu-mission that doctor Christian
Oftebro never had been replaced - “this is an unhealed wound in our mission”. According to
Strømme, NMS had with its age long neglect of medical mission in Zululand “an old debt to
pay”.35
By 1930, the medical mission in NMS’ Zulu-mission was established as a new and promising
field. It was met with great interest among mission supporters in Norway and had called forth
considerable fundraisings. It had further vitalized and inspired the missionary community as a
whole. Also the central management of NMS had accepted medical mission as a new and
important sector of the mission work in South Africa. Einar Amdahl, NMS’ secretary-general,
provided a theological legitimization of the effort when he in NMS’ magazine Norsk
Missionstidende explained to the readers why the hospital-work in South Africa was of great
importance.36 Firstly, it was “charity work” in the name of Jesus Christ. The love of Christ
urged us to practise these deeds of love. Secondly, it paved the way for the Gospel to “huts
and hearts” that otherwise would be closed. Thirdly, the power of the “witchdoctors” was
challenged and in many cases broken. This was of great importance also for the evangelising
task. The Zulu people had a strong fear for evil spirits and supernatural enemies, he claimed,
something which bound them to the traditional witchdoctors who was supposed to help in
cases of sickness and health problems. Through the Christian nursing and medical care,
people’s faith and trust in traditional healers was challenged. Amdal did not cite the nurse
Martha Palm in his article. But in Palm’s constant and thorough defence of medical mission at
several missionary conferences, he could have found declarations worth citing. As in one
example from 1926: “To nurse is to do church work. Nursing goes hand in hand with the
preaching of the gospel. Both leads people out of the darkness of heathenism”.37
To conclude, in this paper I argue that we as gender researchers in the field of men and
masculinities should avoid a one-sided homosocial perspective and be aware of the dangers of
33
Ivar A. Andersen, "Sør-Afrika," in I tro og tjeneste. Det Norske Misjonsselskap 1842-1992, ed. Torstein
Jørgensen (Stavanger: Misjonshøgskolen, 1992), 332-334.
34
Minutes from MC 1924, MA-MHS, 19.
35
Minutes from MC 1926, MA-MHS, 57.
36
Norsk Missionstidende 84, no. 10 (1929): 396.
37
Minutes from MC 1928, MA-MHS, 91: “Derfor blir sykepleien ogsaa et menighetsarbeide, som hand i hand
med evangeliets forkyndelse i menighetene fører dem ut av hedenskapets mørke”.
7
andocentrism. Masculinity is never constructed in vacuum, and in gender studies we should
be especially aware of how masculinity is constructed in relation to, in conflict as well as in
correspondence to, constructions of femininity. In the case of NMS’ mission in South Africa,
I have found that the arrival of professional female missionary workers - and the missionary
nurses from early 1920s in particular – revitalised the mission activity as a whole, expanded
male missionary’s understanding of the nature of mission, and influenced on their own
missionary identities. In other words, constructions of missionary femininity had impact on
constructions of missionary masculinity.
Archival Sources
NMS’ Mission Archive (MA), School of Mission and Theology (MHS)
Norsk Missionstidende 1920-1930
Minutes from NMS’ Missionary Conferences in South Africa, 1920-1930
Literature and printed sources
Andersen, Ivar A. "Sør-Afrika." In I tro og tjeneste. Det Norske Misjonsselskap 1842-1992, ed. Torstein
Jørgensen. Stavanger: Misjonshøgskolen, 1992.
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